Jill Dyché: CEO big data focus good news and bad news for IT

Big data is red hot for CEOs, and that is news both good and bad for data management
professionals. Jill Dyché, vice president of thought leadership at DataFlux,told delegates at a recent data governance conference in London to be on their
mettle, given the heightened visibility data is getting from top business leaders.

Dyché reported that her Harvard Business Review blog post on how to avoid big
data "gotchas" was one of the most popular ever on the website. In that post, she lists five
questions executives need to get answers to if they are to commit to big data. There is both
burning interest and profound scepticism among C-level leadership, according to Dyché. She said the
main question they are asking is, "Does the potential for accelerating existing business processes
warrant the enormous cost associated with technology adoption, project ramp up, and staff hiring
and training that accompany Big Data efforts?"

For more on potential business value of big data for mainstream organisations

CEOs are interested in data governance, regulatory compliance, infosecurity, IT modernization,
strategic enablement and big data, Dyché said in her summit keynote
speech. But the enduring suspicion with big data is that it lends itself merely to academic
exercises. And yet, "Companies are more ready than executives know to exploit value of big
data."

But, she said: "The ability to use information strategically is a function of the degree to
which the data is integrated. The dirty secret of enterprise data warehousing is that the data is
often co-located but not integrated.

"Having a big data warehouse does not mean doing big data, which is the evolution of data
formats and emerging technologies that are quicker and cheaper. Social media interactions are
expensive to do with a data warehouse.

"New technologies can also deal with streaming data from sensors in health care and oil and gas,
fast. Show me someone who says they have a decade of experience with big data and I'll show you
someone who is misinterpreting their data warehouse!" she added.

While top-level
interest in data matters is both welcome and unsettling, so is another trend Dyché identified:
lines of business having IT budgets, attenuating centralised IT control. "It means that greater
governance than ever is needed of the data."

An important element of that is better classification, using more of a security model. And, in
an interview following her summit keynote, Dyché imprecated an enduring disconnect between data
governance and infosecurity in large corporate organisations. "These are different tribes. The
first thing CEOs think of when you say 'infosec' is stolen laptops. We should think more about
policy, who can access what. All data is not the same, and it's not a matter of a whole
democracy."

At a DataFlux healthcare client, the head of security has a seat on the data governance council,
she said. There needs to be a concept of data regimes, she said, so that some data does not leave
its department.

Dyché's advice is to be constantly
wary of the "academic exercise" and "start small, think big. Start with small controlled project,"
proving the business value from there. And, "Don't just grab an executive sponsor. Sometimes
executive sponsorship for data governance and master data management is just a tick box."

Even with big data, mainstream organisations "still need to identify a business problem. What's
the need, pain or problem? It can't be a research project, as with Google, Facebook, or Yahoo. Even
though Hadoop, say, is open source, it is still human intensive.

"And you still need to govern it. 'Why are we doing this? What people are we redeploying in
order to do it?' There is a lot of resource questions, a lot of 'why' questions, with big
data."

Email Alerts

By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent.

By submitting your personal information, you agree to receive emails regarding relevant products and special offers from TechTarget and its partners. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

Google is the latest of the tech giants hiring Wall Street hotshots. The CIO lesson? Partner with your CFO if you want to get ahead. Also in Searchlight: Facebook turns Messenger into an ecosystem; Twitter faces a gender bias lawsuit.